PRIMITIVE FISH-BELIEFS. 5 



of travellers can only remain twenty-four hours, and on 

 the arrival of the next party has to move on, bag and 

 baggage — does not obtain anywhere else, for fish are now 

 thoroughly American in their confusion of classes and 

 the assertion of their disregard for each other's liberty. 



In the general struggle some of them have attained to 

 honours by their force of character. For instance, the 

 salmon — so lordly in its nature as to worthily justify the 

 name of that proud Kmg of Elis who defied Olympus. 

 But he was hurled to the shades by a judiciously-directed 

 thunderbolt, and thus abundantly expiated his arrogant 

 obliquities. So too the shark, that awful Attila of the sea ; 

 and the pike also, the dispeopler of the lake, that by its 

 ferocity of countenance and manners usurps the autocracy 

 of the reedy waters, and compels the vigilance not only of 

 the otter that comes to poach, but of the beasts of man 

 that come to drink, and even of man himself; for it has 

 been known to rout the " goose-footed prowler," to bite off 

 a swan's head, to seize the nose of a drinking cow, and, 

 crowning audacity, to bite man. Did not Theodoric the 

 Goth die of fright at seeing a pike's head on his table ? 

 He mistook it for the head of a person whom he had that 

 day unjustly put to death. 



Other fish, again, have compassed dignity by the passive 

 virtues of their flesh. Did not Domitian order a special 

 session of the Senate to discuss the cooking of a turbot, 

 and " nihil ad rhombum " — all Lombard Street to a 

 China orange — pass into a proverb t What man in Rome 

 would not have been a lamprey to be petted by the 

 beautiful wife of Drusus } and what a pitch of dignity they 

 attained to in the households of epicures, those mullet and 

 mura^na and carp ! 



But by far the greater number have achieved distinction 



